After about two month of intensive working sessions the students of the Surface Grammar Studio presented the final iterations of their projects to a panel of critics consisting of Kari Jormakka (Professor of Architecture Theory, TU-Vienna), Oliver Bertram (Different Futures), Dörte Kuhlmann, Sandra Manninger and myself. One selected project will be produced to form a part of the Archdiploma exhibition which will be staged this fall in the Kunsthalle Project space in the Karlsplatz, Vienna.
Here is an excerpt from the studio outline:
Digital Design Techniques
In computational design techniques we can perceive the presence of one
specific desire: the desire to create seamless continuous bodies as well as sleek and unarticulated surfaces. In this course we are going to tackle this problem with a different approach, opposing the before mentioned desires, and embarking on an exploration of the surface grammar. Three components, differentiation, structure and form, can be read as archetypes of architectural conditions, simultaneously unfolding in novel spatial experiences trough the use of advanced computational design techniques that enable us to explore other geometries.
What we perceive, or understand as a surface grammar, can be described as the means to generate all the valid strings of a specific surface language; it can also be used as the basis for a recognizer that determines for any given string whether it is grammatical (i.e. belongs to the language). To describe such recognizers, formal language theory uses separate formalisms, known as automata.
A grammar can also be used to analyze the strings of a language – i.e. to describe their internal structure. In computer science, this process is known as parsing. Most languages have very compositional semantics, i.e. the meaning of their utterances is structured according to their syntax; therefore, the first step to describing the meaning of an utterance in language is to analyze it and look at its analyzed form (known as its parse tree in computer science, and as its deep structure in generative grammar).
In this sense we are using geometry as the basic grammar of the surface explorations. To rigorously investigate this condition the course relies on a contained set of geometrical rules, or strings of information. This container is formed by specific tessellations. Two conditions form the rules of the surface grammar:
Tessellation & Delamination. These two conditions alone can create a thriving array of variation.
